Sven Birkerts puts some of his worriesabout the decay of print culture and literary criticism in a digital age in an article entitled Lost in the blogosphere, in the Boston Globe. This expresses what many in the literary world currently feel and think about blogging. He is not simply sayingthat newspapers are reducing the space allotted to literary criticism or too many people on the Web are writing about books.The frame is one of a threat to literary culture and lost cultural forms.

Birkerts identifies himself as a man of print, shaped by its biases and hierarchies, tinged by its not-so-buried elitist premises, then adds:

My impulse is to argue that if the Web at large is the old Freudian "polymorphous perverse," that libidinally undifferentiated miasma of yearnings and gratifications, unbounded and free, then culture itself -- what we have been calling "culture" at least since the Enlightenment -- is the emergent maturity that constrains unbounded freedom in the interest of mattering. But this "mattering" requires the existence of a common ground, a shared set of traditions -- a center which is the collectively known picture of private and public life as set out by artists and thinkers, and discussed and debated not just by everyone with an opinion, but also most effectively by the self-constituted group of those who have made it their purpose to do so. Arbiters, critics . . . reviewers.

The blogosphere, Birkets argue, works in the opposite direction. Though there are arbiters aplenty -- some of the smartest print writers are active on blogs as well -- the very nature of the blogosphere is proliferation and dispersal; it is centrifugal and represents a fundamental reversal of the norms of print culture.

Proliferation -- the chaos of the endlessly branching paths -- is one crucial structural difference between the print and digital realms. Never mind that the Web has swallowed vast archives of print material; we are also seeing a significant shift in the nature of the discourse itself. Blogs and on-line journals do not simply transfer old wine into new bottles -- the wine itself is changing.

Fair enough as an account to the way the wine is changing. Birkerts interprets this change in terms of the difference between amateur and professional. What we gain in independence and freshness he says we lose in authority and accountability. So It's freedom versus order issue. Birkerts adds:

I'm talking about print reviewing here. For as exciting as the blogosphere is as a supplement, as a place of provocation and response, it is too fluid in its nature ever to focus our widely diverging cultural energies. A hopscotch through the referential enormity of argument and opinion cannot settle the ground under our feet. To have a sense of where we stand, and to hold not just a number of ideas in common, but also some shared way of presenting those ideas, we continue to need, among many others,